


All You Had to Do Was Ask

by Anonymous



Category: Dead Poet's Society (1989)
Genre: Halloween, Necromancy, Other, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-09-13
Updated: 2008-09-13
Packaged: 2017-10-01 23:13:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are secrets everywhere at Welton.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All You Had to Do Was Ask

There are secrets everywhere at Welton. Todd discovered this over the fall and winter, and he carried them inside his chest like his heart. It wasn't that he looked for them, or that he liked them, but only that he noticed them, and no one else did.

After Neil died—_killed himself_, Todd corrected himself firmly every time he thought _died_—the secrets were less important. Everything was less important. He went to class and did his homework and ate in the dining room and attended study hall and inhaled and exhaled and tried not to think anything that wasn't the truth.

He carried truth close to himself, afraid that it would break the way Neil had. When Neil had told the truth, had stood on that stage and told the truth in another man's words, he'd died for it, and Todd couldn't bear to think of that kind of destruction ever happening again.

The coffin at the funeral had been closed, but Todd knew what his roommate had done. He'd blown his head off. The imagination that Mr. Keating had sparked was a horrible thing in the months after Neil's suicide; the school was smart enough not to try and give Todd another roommate right away, and Todd was grateful for it. It would have been OK if Neil had been the one to hear him crying from fear of his nightmares, but that was the problem. It was Neil he was afraid of in the nightmares, Neil's body that brought him to tears, Neil's bloody corpse he wept over.

That was his secret.

When spring began, Todd began finding the secrets again. He didn't want them, but they were everywhere, just begging to be noticed. It was amazing, really, how little people saw. Or maybe not. Maybe they knew how not to look, because Todd didn't. Knox had finally given up on getting Chris to date him, and Meeks and Pitts were the same as they had always been, _meeksandpitts, pittsandmeeks_, just like that, and no one spoke to or looked at Cameron if they could help it, even the teachers, and Charlie, who'd never be Nuwanda again, was gone. Mr. Keating was back in England; he'd sent Todd a short note, and had added on the back: _Don't write back. I know what you want to say._

It wasn't until the next year, his senior year at Welton, that Todd found the really big secret. The first two months had gone by in a blur, and all Todd could think about the lack of Neil, a palpable space beside him. Last year, it had been a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding, no matter how invisibly, and now it was a gap in the air around him, a sense that something very important was missing.

He spent most of his time in the library. His room was always cold and empty, even when he was there. The library was full of knowledge, and he read thousands of pages by the time Halloween came around. He went through all the history and literary criticism, and was halfway through Dr. Bruce H. Evanston's thirty-year-old lectures on Rembrandt when he looked up, put the book down, part of the binding flaking off as he did so, and went off to see if that dull book on _Ancient Myths and Legends_ had really said what he thought he remembered reading.

It did.

Halloween, luckily, was a Friday, and Todd's room was on the end of the hall. It wouldn't have mattered much; most of the boys who were near him were either a little scared of him after the sweaty-toothed madman scene of last year or new, and someone had sneaked in a few bottles of beer, so they were all busy getting drunk without waking up Mr. Haber.

Todd's room faced north, and was dim at the best of times. At sunset in late October Vermont, the air was grey and chill. The smell of sulphur when Todd struck the first match was overwhelming in the ordinary damp wool and stone smell of the room. Shadows danced on the panelling, and Todd's hands shook as he lit the three candles on his closet floor. _A dark, enclosed space is best,_ the book had said, in blurred text that seemed to quiver on the page.

He took a deep breath, and reached for the sheet of paper that lay on the floor beside him. His cramped handwriting (Neil had stopped borrowing his Latin notes after the middle of September, because he claimed that Todd's handwriting gave him a headache) filled three-quarters of the page, blots and crossouts on every line, since his fingers had been stiff with cold and his mind suddenly ablaze with possibility.

"Veni," he whispered. His watch read six-thirty-four. Two hours before the candles could be blown out and the second part of the ritual could be done, and Todd sat back on his heels, blew out his breath, and began to wait.

The candles burned slowly in the close air, and Todd's lungs ached before the two hours were half gone. His eyes burned from the smoke, and he counted three hundred and twenty-six breaths before losing track. He didn't think _What if it doesn't work_, because it would work. It had to.

He couldn't bear to think of failure. That would be worse than being woken at four in the morning by Meeks, woken from a dream of a dark-eyed fairy, to the pale faces of his friends—_Neil's dead. He killed himself_. It would be worse, because this time it would be his fault. Last time it had been Mr. Perry's fault, and Todd would have tried to hate his roommate's father all last winter if he hadn't been so absorbed in his own grief.

Running out into the snow as the sun came up, weak as lemon-water, and much the same color, seemed to have frozen all emotions within him except fear and grief and pain—standing on that wobbly desk with the carvings from years past on it had been a triumph, and his last until now.

When 8:30 came, true dark had long fallen, and when he blew the candles out, the disappearance of the light was more than visible; it was a caress on his shoulders and a whispering in his ears—_do you want to do this, Todd? Do you, Toddie?_—from the ghosts he'd already had haunting him, his secrets from last year.

He'd seen Meeks and Pitts almost kiss once, half-hidden at the side of the chapel, Meeks crouching to pick up a dropped hymnbook and Pitts reaching down to grab his hand and bending his knees just a little too much and pulling just a little too hard and Meeks flying up just a little faster than he'd thought he would and bumping into Pitts's chest, nearly knocking him a half-step backwards, except that he'd leaned an inch closer to Meeks, not away, and they'd been that single breath away from each other before flushing and yanking apart. Todd had let his breath out as space became visible between them again.

He'd never told them—not because he didn't know what to say, but because there was nothing to say, and because by then, it hadn't mattered, one secret submerged under a thousand others. He breathed secrets, slept with them tangled in his bedclothes, washed off secrets in the shower with secret soaps and dried his skin with secret towels.

The white chalk he'd taken from the mathematics classroom left dust on his fingers as he dragged it over the floor. He wrote his name and Neil's, drew lines between them, put the dead candles in a triangle around their names, and sat back to wait another three hours. His heartbeat seemed louder than his voice when he whispered, "Veni, amice mei."

The tension was strung across his shoulders and down his back, pulling his spine straight and stiff. Mr. Haber would be proud of his posture. His fingertips tingled with the cold and he chafed his hands across the wool of his trousers. His palms were damp with sweat and when he reached for his watch, it slipped out of his fingers twice. After that, he didn't let go it at all, afraid that the next time, he would miss the three-hour mark of this part of the ceremony. The book had been clear that a few seconds' difference was acceptable, but not much more than that, or he wouldn't get what he was asking for; he'd have an _almost_ on his hands, and an _almost_, or a _possible_, would be worse than outright failure. Whatever came out of the ceremony was his to deal with.

When the time was finally over, he reached eagerly for the bread and butter. He'd been too nervous at dinner to eat much, and had been briefly thankful for the dissection lessons in biology, but now the emptiness in his gut was distracting and almost painful. The salt he sprinkled on top made his mouth flood with saliva, and he swallowed hard. As he chewed the second slice carefully, he murumured, "Veni adme, amice mei."

"You know, all you had to do was ask," Neil said. Todd couldn't tell how much time had passed, but when he tried to stand up, his legs were buzzing, pins-and-needles.

Neil leaned over and threw an arm around his shoulders. "Sit down, Todd. It's OK. Breathe. I'm impressed, actually. You've been doing well."

"Neil&amp;mdash"

"I can't stay. You should know that."

"How long?"

"Until I have to go back."

"I'll take what I can get."

"Nah. You didn't," Neil pointed out, gesturing at the burnt-out candles, the slightly smudged chalk letters, the bread crumbs and salt grains on the floor.

"That was different. It was you," Todd said, and leaned against Neil's shoulder. He'd never dared to do this while Neil was — alive. Alive, and now he was dead, and he was here, and they were sitting in his closet at Welton and his head was on Neil's shoulder and Neil's arm was still on his shoulder, a warm weight on his neck, and he couldn't see Neil because there were no candles and it was after midnight, and—

"I wouldn't have come for anyone else," Neil said, and when he turned his head in the darkness, his lips were briefly against Todd's forehead. "Thanks for this."

"You're welcome." A wholly inadequate response, Todd knew, but the only one he could think of. The buzzing in his legs had spread to his brain now, and he couldn't remember what the next step in the ritual was. He had to get it right. He was supposed to square the circle, and that meant, that meant...he shook his head. Neil still smelled like clean cotton undershirts and pepper, and for the moment, that was enough. "Let's just stay here a while, okay?" he asked, and Neil's answering chuckle was a puff of breath in his ear


End file.
